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Language Arts And Reading Instruction: Other Resources

Lesson planning resources for language arts and reading in the Pre-K - 12 classroom.

Resources

Community Club
Part of Scholastic's Listen and Read collection of short stories that young readers can read and/or listen to. The Community Club section includes eight community helpers. There is a quiz at the end of each story. Other subject areas covered are: American History, Animals, Civics and Government, Environmental Studies, Plants and Flowers, Science, and Social Studies
Grades: PreK - 2
Lexile Framework for Reading
Lexile measures both text complexity as well as student reading ability and this website provides tools to help teachers, students and parents match books to a student's reading level. You can identify the Lexile measure for a specific title, or identify books for a student. Registering enables you to save reading lists or to find the Lexile measure of your own text.
Grades: K - 12
Life in Elizabethan England
Nearly 90 pages of information about everyday life in Tudor England--food, occupations, games, religion, fashion, manners, attitudes and education in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare. Written by Maggie Secara for writers, actors and re-enactors.
Grades: 6 - 12
LitPick
Founded by Seth Cassel (co-founder of the website, Flamingnet Teen Book Reviews) this website encourages teens and preteens to register to read and review books for teens. All students must have an adult sponsor to participate. Students select books to be reviewed that are sent to them in either print or ebook format.
Grades: 4 - 12
NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts
Developed jointly by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) these standards complement other standards for the English Language Arts.
Grades: K - 12
Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America
The full text of a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey that found that literary reading is in dramatic decline. The report interprets data on literary reading of 17,000 adults and compares them with results from similar surveys carried out in 1982 and 1992.
Grades: 9 - 12
Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy
Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read. Reading on the Rise is based on early results from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.
Grades: 9 - 12
Text Complexity Tools
Developed by Renaissance Learning for the Accelerated Reader (AR) program ATOS is a measure of text complexity or reading level. This website provides a link to two tools, ATOS Text Analyzer (that enables you to identify the reading level of a particular passage or book) and the AR BookFinder (a database that identifies the reading level of 150,000 books).
Grades: K - 12
To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence
This 2007 report is a comprehensive analysis of reading patterns of children, teenagers, and adults in the United States. Assembling data on reading trends from many sources, this report expands the 2004 report, Reading at Risk, and reveals declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike.
Grades: K - 12